SEOUL — Any day of the week, the North Korean propaganda machine can be relied upon to spew out anti-American vitriol using some formulation of “imperialist” and “aggressor” and “hostile.”

The Kim family has kept a tight grip on North Korea for some seven decades by perpetuating the idea that the Americans are out to get them. From the earliest age, North Korean children are taught“cunning American wolves” — illustrated by fair-haired, pale-skinned men with huge noses — want to kill them.

“North Koreans live in a war mentality, and this anti-American propaganda is war-time propaganda,” said Tatiana Gabroussenko, an expert in North Korean propaganda who teaches at Korea University in Seoul.

The thing is: there is some element of truth to the North Korean version of events. It’s only a kernel, and it is grossly exaggerated, but North Koreans remember very well what most Americans have forgotten (or never knew): that the Korean War was a brutal one.

‘Utter ruin and devastation’

“Korea is called the forgotten war, and part of what has been forgotten is the utter ruin and devastation that we rained down on the North Korean people,” said John Delury, a professor in the international relations department at Yonsei University in Seoul. “But this has been ingrained into the North Korean psyche.”

First: a little history.

The Korean Peninsula, previously occupied by Japan, was divided at the end of World War II. Dean Rusk — an Army colonel at the time, who went on to become secretary of state — got a map basically drew a line across at the 38th parallel. To their surprise, the Soviet Union agreed to the line, and the communist-backed North and the American-backed South were established in 1948 as a “temporary measure.”

On June 25, 1950, Kim Il Sung, installed by the Soviets to lead North Korea, decided to try to reunify the peninsula by force, invading the south. (Although in the North Korean version of events, the South and their imperialist patrons started it.)

The push south was surprisingly successful until General Douglas MacArthur landed his troops on the mudflats at Incheon, sending the northern troops back. Then the Chinese got involved, managing to push them back to roughly where they started, on the 38th parallel.

All this happened within the first six months or so. For the next two-and-a-half years, neither side was able to make any headway. The war was drawn to a close in 1953, after exacting a bloody toll.

“The number of Korean dead, injured or missing by war’s end approached three million, 10 percent of the overall population,” Charles K. Armstrong, a professor of Korean history at Columbia University, wrote in an essay. “The majority of those killed were in the North, which had half of the population of the South.”

But the war ended with an armistice, not with a peace treaty. That means that, to this day, North and South Korea remain in a technical state of war.

Making the war ‘a most unpopular affair’ for the North Koreans

American military leaders at the time called the Korean War a “limited war” because they did not let it expand outside the Korean Peninsula. But on the peninsula, it was total devastation, particularly for the North.

The United States dropped 635,000 tons of bombs in Korea, not counting the 32,557 tons of napalm, Bruce Cumings, a University of Chicago professor who’s written several books on North Korea, wrote in “The Korean War: A History.” This compared with 503,000 tons in the entire Pacific theater in World War II.

“If we keeping on tearing the place apart, we can make it a most unpopular affair for the North Koreans,” Defense Secretary Robert Lovett said after the napalm and aerial bombing campaigns of 1950 and 1951, according to Cumings. “We ought to go right ahead,” Lovett said.

Rusk said the United States bombed “everything that moved in North Korea, every brick standing on top of another.” After running low on urban targets, U.S. bombers destroyed hydroelectric and irrigation dams in the later stages of the war, flooding farmland and destroying crops, former Post correspondent Blaine Harden wrote on these pages in 2015.

Air Force commanders complained that they’d run out of targets.

“The physical destruction and loss of life on both sides was almost beyond comprehension, but the North suffered the greater damage, due to American saturation bombing and the scorched-earth policy of the retreating UN forces,” Armstrong of Columbia wrote.

Fueling the North Korean narrative

The Kim regime keeps its people afraid by constantly blaming the United States for its situation, especially sanctions for its economic plight. But this also helps it unify the populace against a supposed external threat.

“Anti-Americanism is an ideological tool of the government,” said Peter Ward, a North Korea researcher affiliated with the Asan Institute for Policy Studies in Seoul. “They need an enemy and a villain to blame for the division of the country, a scapegoat for the situation they were in.”

When the United States loses, it’s more likely to become the bogeyman, Ward said. “Look at Vietnam. Americans used much more napalm on the Vietnamese, but they’re on good terms today."

As tensions between North Korea and the United States have escalated in recent months, the North has turned up the volume on its propaganda machine, in addition to launching a series of missiles.

In response, President Trump has repeatedly threatened to use force to punish North Korea (although he’s also said he’d be “honored” to meet Kim Jong Un.)

“When a new and untested American president starts dangling out the prospect of a surprise missile attack as the solution to the North Korean problem, it plays directly into their worst narrative that the regime tells its people,” Delury said.

And the worst narrative is bad.

From the very real events of the Korean War, North Korea’s propagandists have created a version of history that is designed to keep the shock and horror alive more than six decades later.

North Korea’s discourse on the Korean War — called the “Victorious Fatherland Liberation War” in North Korea — was constructed according to Soviet propaganda used against Nazi Germany during World War II.

“North Korea’s propaganda writers were educated in the Soviet Union,” said Gabroussenko, who grew up in the Soviet Union.

Russia perceived itself as being attacked by Germany in what it called “The Great Patriotic War,” she said. “So, according to the North Korean version of the Korean War, they were also fighting a great patriotic war against American intruders.”

Take the Sinchon Museum of American War Atrocities south of Pyongyang, one of many museums in North Korea designed to keep the regime’s narrative alive. It recalls what North Korea says was a massacre carried out by U.S. troops.

There was fighting and death in Sinchon during the Korean War, but North Korea is widely held to have vastly exaggerated them with its claim that some 35,000 “martyrs” were killed by U.S. soldiers during a massacre there.

This is one of what Ward calls the “fake atrocities” that North Korea has created to bolster anti-American nationalism.

Kim Jong Un has visited it several times since he became leader at the end of 2011. During a visit after a major expansion of the museum in July 2015, turning it into “a center for anti-U.S. class education,” Kim celebrated “the victory day when the Korean people defeated the U.S. imperialists.”

“No matter how crafty the U.S. imperialists become in their moves to cover up their crimes, they can never erase the traces of massacre of Koreans left in this land,” Kim said, according to a state media report.

He also ordered his cadres to “intensify the anti-imperialist and anti-U.S. education.” The Korean Central News Agency reported in March, that “more than 18,000 service personnel, working people and youths and students visited the museum” in the first 10 days of the month, “their hearts burning with the resolution to punish the U.S. imperialists and the South Korean warmongers.

U.S. troops land in Korea to begin their postwar occupation of the southern part of that nation, almost exactly one month after Soviet troops had entered northern Korea to begin their own occupation. Although the U.S. and Soviet occupations were supposed to be temporary, the division of Korea quickly became permanent.

Korea had been a Japanese possession since the early 20th century. During World War II, the allies–the United States, Soviet Union, China, and Great Britain–made a somewhat hazy agreement that Korea should become an independent country following the war. As the war progressed, U.S. officials began to press the Soviets to enter the war against Japan. At the Yalta Conference in February 1945, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin pledged that his nation would declare war on Japan exactly three months after Nazi Germany was defeated. A few months later, at the Potsdam Conference in July and August 1945, it was agreed that Soviet troops would occupy the northern portion of Korea, while American forces would take a similar action in southern Korea in order to secure the area and liberate it from Japanese control. The occupations would be temporary, and Korea would eventually decide its own political future, though no date was set for the end of the U.S. and Soviet occupations. On August 8, the Soviets declared war on Japan. On August 9, Soviet forces invaded northern Korea. A few days later, Japan surrendered. Keeping to their part of the bargain, U.S. forces entered southern Korea on September 8, 1945.

Over the next few years, the situation in Korea steadily worsened. A civil war between communist and nationalist forces in southern Korea resulted in thousands of people killed and wounded. The Soviets steadfastly refused to consider any plans for the reunification of Korea. The United States reacted by setting up a government in South Korea, headed by Syngman Rhee. The Soviets established a communist regime in North Korea, under the leadership of Kim Il-Sung. In 1948, the United States again offered to hold national elections, but the Soviets refused the offer. Elections were held in South Korea, and Rhee’s government received a popular mandate. The Soviets refused to recognize Rhee’s government, though, and insisted that Kim Il-Sung was the true leader of all Korea.

Having secured the establishment of a communist government in North Korea, Soviet troops withdrew in 1948; and U.S. troops in South Korea followed suit in 1949. In 1950, the North Koreans attempted to reunite the nation by force and launched a massive military assault on South Korea. The United States quickly came to the aid of South Korea, beginning a three-year involvement in the bloody and frustrating Korean War. Korea remains a divided nation today, and the North Korean regime is one of the few remaining communist governments left in the world.

I dont think N korea hating the US, rahter the US hating them. N. korea is just telling the US thats hes no global cop and dont Fxxk with them. I think if US didnt bother N . korea, there would be no arguing at all. U.S is always a global trouble maker for the sake of their armament industry. That's all. The only country whos afraid of world peace is america. A peaceful world would make them broke.
Everyone on earth knows that.

What you "think" seems to be unsupportable and it certainly contradicts what N Korean refugees tell. Hate is being orchestrated from the top down in N Korea. it's not unlike China during the Evilolution.